Battle Over Iroquois Land Claims Escalates

By DAVID W. CHEN

Published: May 16, 2000

ONONDAGA NATION—
The Oneidas want 250,000 acres of rural New York between Syracuse and Utica. The Cayugas are staking claim to a 64,000-acre wishbone at the northern tip of Cayuga Lake. The Senecas are eyeing the Buffalo bedroom community of Grand Island. And the Mohawks, though distracted by a possible Catskills casino, are asking for various islands and parcels straddling the Canadian border.

For years, these Indian nations, all members of the Iroquois confederation, have demanded the return of vast swaths of land based on treaties dating back to George Washington's administration. But within the next few months, the stakes will increase as two cases head toward a trial and the Onondagas file the last, and most valuable, Iroquois land claim: a heavily populated tract of 64,000 acres that includes Syracuse.

No one is saying that Syracuse will suddenly change hands, or that anyone will be forcibly uprooted. But with the Iroquois backed by the federal government, the claims will probably lead to settlements or litigation costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, and could intensify the anger over one of the biggest and touchiest topics in upstate New York.

And unlike other states, particularly in the West, which typically have Indian land claims in thinly populated areas resulting from the federal seizure of land, New York occupies a dubious position: it has more claims than any other state, but has been the slowest to resolve those claims, which total roughly 620 square miles, about double the size of New York City.

''There's a problem here that's over 25 years old,'' said Steven M. Tullberg, director of the Washington office of the Indian Law Resource Center, which has advised numerous Indian groups, ''that's been passed from administration to administration, that's involved lots of people, lots of money, lots of lawyers, and after all that period of time, nothing is resolved.''

To some residents, the real issues are: Why us? Why now? The subject has triggered such an antagonistic reaction that it could be a major issue in the fall elections and a potential problem for the Democratic Senate candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose husband's administration has been accused by Gov. George E. Pataki of giving unconditional support to unfair Indian land claims and a lawsuit naming 20,000 landowners as defendants.

''They're buying plazas, stores, entire tracts, farmland, and the reservations are like checkerboards,'' said Leon R. Koziol, a Utica lawyer who has represented several landowner groups. ''Then eventually, what do you have? A virtual country within a country, and it's scary.''

The Iroquois, though, say the issue has never been about greed or power. In fact, they have pledged not to evict any landowners. What they say is at stake is redressing ancient wrongs and securing a better future for their descendants.

So it was all the more symbolic when about 50 chiefs from the Iroquois nations convened a rare meeting in March just south of Syracuse at the sacred longhouse that is the spiritual and political heart of the Iroquois -- or, as they prefer to be called, Haudenosaunee.

While the formal agenda, conducted solemnly in Iroquois languages, focused on selecting new Mohawk leaders, the informal discussion swirled around the nation-by-nation status of their claims.

''Our people have been waiting a long time for this,'' said Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation. ''This is not something we just made up.''

During the late 1700's and early 1800's, New York State bought or seized most Iroquois properties without Congressional ratification, thereby violating the Federal Trade and Intercourse Act of 1790. Yet for years, the Iroquois failed to reverse these deals, stymied by discrimination and legal obstacles, said Robert W. Venables, a senior lecturer in the American Indian program at Cornell University.

In 1970, the Oneidas became the first Iroquois nation to file a land claim in federal court. And in 1985, the Supreme Court sided with the Oneidas, in a 5-to-4 decision concerning a test case that named Oneida and Madison Counties as defendants and claimed only 900 acres.

At that point, the state and the Oneidas began settlement talks, which yielded mostly accusations of foot-dragging. Then, in December 1998, the Oneidas and the Justice Department, hoping to pressure the state and the two counties, moved to name 20,000 landowners as defendants.

People noticed.

''There has been much more activity in the last few months than in all the years previous,'' said Richard Rifkin, a deputy state attorney general, referring to all the claims.

The landowners' predicament has prompted officials like Governor Pataki, Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert to ask the Justice Department to drop the 20,000 landowners from the Oneida suit.

Mr. Pataki, for instance, sent a pointed letter to President Clinton in early April, accusing the administration of offering ''unconditional support'' to a tribe that held residents ''hostage under clouded real estate titles and the constant threat of eviction, while systematically executing a plan to amass large quantities of land upon which it pays no real estate taxes, evades all state and federal environmental and land use regulations, and wages a war of unfair business competition against the law- abiding, taxpaying business owners in central New York.''

And in the Senate campaign, both Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York and Mrs. Clinton have sympathized with the landowners, though neither has discussed the issue at length.